Yes!

Coo er, gosh, it's actually happening!  I refer to the nascent house move, of course.  And what a rare and delightful opportunity it is to use the word "nascent".  Anyway, the chain is complete; everybody is very excited (instead of trying desperately to keep in mind that it might all fall through) and money has changed hands, in the form of a cheque (yes really - isn't it quaint!) from us to our firm of solicitors.  It turns out that these solicitors aren't actually providing us with a solicitor, but a conveyancer. She still charges out at £185 per hour though, so I hope she's good at it.  I imagine the up-side might be that as a specialist, she doesn't consider conveyancing to be a bit beneath her, as I'm sure actual solicitors do.  So far so good; she seems to be on the case and responding to emails.

One feature of house buying nowadays is that the legal fees involved pale into insignificance next to the stamp duty imposed by our ever-inventive government du jour.  They have to do this, so that they can let some people off it, who couldn't possibly afford to buy a house otherwise.  If that sort of natural market force were allowed to prevail, the price of houses would come down, which would of course be bad for morale, because we'd all feel poor and insecure.  So to keep prices artificially high, and trick house owners and first-time buyers into feeling more wealthy that they otherwise would do, the innocent house-buying public have to shell out.  Really the only winners are estate agents, who charge a percentage of the sale price (regardless of what the thing is actually worth, and whether they do anything positive to help sell it).

Anyway, I expect you're all wondering what this fabled mansion, of such rare qualities that 34 viewings were needed to find it, is like.  Or maybe not.  All I can say at this stage is:

• It's at 50.681868,-3.492276 for the google maps enthusiasts amongst you.  No street view camera has made it that far yet though! If you're wondering what's happening next door, and what the big hole in the ground beyond that is, I've no idea yet, except to say that it doesn't look like this when you go there!
• It's only four years old, and it's on a small development of extremely similar looking houses. It remains to be seen whether they are, in fact, all made out of ticky-tacky.
  (Pete Seeger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_FB9bwyp6M )
• It requires a small extension to make it into the house we actually want, so we have all the fun of that still to come.
• It recycles its own rainwater and uses it for the garden hose, and flushing the downstairs loo!
• It comes with a trampoline in the garden.  It's good one too - definitely adult size, with a big safety net for the avoidance of the more obvious catastrophic operational mistakes. I made it a condition of our offer:  the trampoline stays.  They said OK.
• It has a double garage.

In celebration of the last point, here's a picture of the garage:

Ahhh!  I think you can see the appeal now.  I'm feeling more relaxed already. Cheers!